the band

My name is Gary Mackender. I'm a working musician and visual artist living in Tucson, Arizona and the Carnivaleros is my band.

I started this project in 2001 as a vehicle to hear a full band play the music I'd been writing on the accordion, an instrument I picked up around 1996. The first CD (Step Right Up!) was recorded in 2003 and the Tucson Weekly said "The Carnivaleros sound like their name suggests - an amalgam of Tex-Mex, circus music, Zydeco, traditional Western, spy themes, Eastern European motifs, and everything else under the sun. The album is stellar, veering abruptly yet seamlessly from one style to another on a dime - a waltz here, a polka there, and you can dance to all of it."

Since those early days, many of Tucson's finest have found their way on stage playing this mix of desert bayou music. No matter who's on stage with me these days, we remain a band that knows how to swing, waltz and polka in the same breath.

Michael P Nordberg, Marx Loeb, 'Mighty' Joel Ford, Larry Lee Lerma, Carla Brownlee, Mitzi Cowell, Karl Hoffmann (Nerja, Spain), Chris Giambelluca (California), Heather Hardy, Catherine Zavala, Danny Krieger, Jim Howell, Sid George, Sabra Faulk, Teddy Morgan (Nashville), Richard Medek (Minneapolis), Steve Grams, Ed Friedland (Austin), Bev Seckinger, Jay Trapp, Ed Davenport, Jimmy Carr, Dante Rosano, Marco Rosano, Tony Rosano, Michael Joyal, Nick Augustine, Hans Hutchison, Ralph Gilmore, Greg Mackender, Chad Bush, Dave Resto